Read-Only Utility Automates Detailed Audits of UserGate NGFW Firewall Policies
A cybersecurity specialist at Gazprom CPS developed a read-only utility to analyze large-scale UserGate NGFW firewall policies without making any configuration changes. The tool connects via the UserGate XML-RPC API to collect rules, statistics, zones, network lists, services, users, and groups, then normalizes the data into a unified model for analysis. It performs eleven independent checks grouped into lifecycle, overly permissive access, observability, and documentation categories, flagging rules that have not fired recently, allow management ports broadly, lack logging, or have empty descriptions. Results are exported to a navigable Excel report featuring a rules-by-checks matrix, human-readable object names, and editable manual verdicts such as OK, requires attention, or false positive. The first full run on a production policy with over 1000 rules and 4500 related objects took 24 minutes and highlighted 39 percent of rules for review, with more than half showing multiple red flags. The approach preserves the original snapshot in JSON for repeatable offline analysis and comparison over time.
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